Why Does the Universe Exist?

Posted by DJL on Sep 11, 2014 in Science | 1 comment

I love big questions. Questions about meaning, existence, purpose. I love big questions. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I believe I can answer them, just that I love struggling with them. 🙂

That wasn’t always the case, though. When I was a freshman in college and looking at required courses, I shied away from the intro. to philosophy course because I couldn’t imagine spending all my time trying to answer questions to which there are no answers. As a tribute – or, I suppose, a critique, depending on your point of view (though I mean it as a tribute 🙂 ) – to my liberal arts education at Franklin & Marshall College, by the time I was a senior I couldn’t imagine wasting my time on any questions that had a definite or singular answer. Quite a turnaround!

This explains what appealed to me about Jim Holt’s TED Talk on “Why Does the Universe Exist?” Talk about a big question! But what appealed to me about Holt’s Talk wasn’t just the chutzpah of the question, but that he proposes several possibilities, not trying to reduce such a large question to a single, let alone simple, answer. Rather, he invites us to consider a variety of possibilities, not simply to address the question but also to get to know ourselves better, identifying and assessing our own values, beliefs, and convictions by paying attention to why different theories appeal to us.

In the end, I may not agree with all the possibilities that Holt offers. But that’s hardly the point. Thanks to listening to his talk, I get the chance to lean into the question, know myself better, and am more equipped to respond to the universe in front of me by having had the chance to ask the question and wrestle with a possible answer.

Holt, a philosopher and writer by trade, has written for Slate, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. This talk is based on his larger book exploring this question entitled, not surprisingly, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

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